The FFED3D Thread

These guys are right you know. I gave up on the original and I nearly gave up on the PC version of FFE, simply because whenever I got into a combat situation I would die...without question. A lot of the time my opponent was a big ship with a 100MW laser or maybe even a Plasma Accelerator. It seemed that no amount of shields would protect me.

I did sometimes use the "pause the game, line up opponent, shoot them before they have the chance to shoot me" trick, but didn't like it as it felt like cheating. I tried my old FE2 technique of thrusting backwards with my opponent on screen, but not in my targetter, as they would always miss and when they were close enough they were a sitting target, but that didn't work either.

No, what DraQ says about thrusting towards them while they're on the edge of your screen does seem to work, then as they break off their attack you immediately hook onto their tail...that method works well.

Not always mind you. Sometimes you will get hit within a second or two of the alarms ringing, but don't dally, (don't look at your scanner first, just engines off and move move move), and you'll find those percentages you mentioned dropping.

I don't play the game anymore, but I went from Constrictor to Asp to Tiger to Panter Clipper to Thargoid Vessel back to Asp, and I found my combat skills were slightly better than they had been the first time I flew the Asp.
 
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I did sometimes use the "pause the game, line up opponent, shoot them before they have the chance to shoot me" trick, but didn't like it as it felt like cheating.
Well, it was. :D

I tried my old FE2 technique of thrusting backwards with my opponent on screen, but not in my targetter, as they would always miss and when they were close enough they were a sitting target, but that didn't work either.
A workable idea is to put some high power pulse laser (5-30MW) on the front for attacks on big, heavily armoured ships, and 1MW beam on the back for swatting mosquitoes - if you can't pick them off with the pulse, you can switch to rear view and fly away from them slashing them with the beam as they spend most of their thrust keeping up and can spare little for evasive manoeuvres.

Sometimes you will get hit within a second or two of the alarms ringing, but don't dally, (don't look at your scanner first, just engines off and move move move), and you'll find those percentages you mentioned dropping.
1-2s is a lot of time at the beginning of the combat - you should give full burn ASAP simultaneously rotating your ship, while trying to see the enemies on the scanner at the same time - burn, turn and seek.
 
A nice new Osprey X ship is on its way

OspreyX.jpg


But not the finished article, from what I can gather :)
 
Who is doing that one then? looks pretty nice from here.
It's someone on the Elite Russia forums called "KrIM" and the impressive thing is this is their first attempt at modelling a ship for FFED3D.

There's a slightly modified version available for download too, which does away with the buggy engine animation while adding a few other nice touches :)
 
The advice in this thread is spot-on, but there are a couple of reasons that can make JJFFE combat harder than if you were playing the original back in '96:

1. Frame rate. The AIs use a targeting method where every second they "sweep" their bows across the target. At low frame rates they'll usually miss even if the sweep was accurately aimed.

2. There was a bug in FFE where ships before yours in the object array couldn't hit you with lasers if you had any significant velocity in the current frame of reference. With the Gateway or Mars start, this meant that in most star systems none of the pirates could hit you. When you died, it was usually due to a collision or a missile.

With practise it's still quite possible to get through 100 pirates without a death, but you do need the technique. Alternatively you can side-thrust with the numpad, but that makes it a bit boring.
 
ffe mod /vista

I don,t know about every one else but windows vista and windows 7 have caused me nothing but trouble with every thing from media dll,s to word documents, both at work and while gaming.
I for one will be formatting my new computer and putting a copy of windows xp back on it, im tierd of all this :mad:
and besides xp is less demanding on your pc so you should get faster performance any way.:rolleyes:
 
Hi David
Welcome to the forum. What you say about Windows 7 and Vista maybe true, but don't forget that updates for XP are due to dry up soon according to reports. I have to admit though, I have a dual boot PC with Vista and XP. I only really use XP. Think I might get rid of Vista and install Windows 98 instead! :D
 
I don,t know about every one else but windows vista and windows 7 have caused me nothing but trouble with every thing from media dll,s to word documents, both at work and while gaming.
I for one will be formatting my new computer and putting a copy of windows xp back on it, im tierd of all this :mad:
and besides xp is less demanding on your pc so you should get faster performance any way.:rolleyes:

Hmm odd - I've had no issues with W7 at all - I love it and you'd have to pay me a considerable amount to make me go back.
 

Sir.Tj

The Moderator who shall not be Blamed....
Volunteer Moderator
No to be honest, I'm not the biggest fan of Windows as a whole. But it seems that W7 is a big improvement on Vista (not that hard to do...)

More stable and so far not update after update after update after update after update etc....
 
My biggest problem with Vista is that it seems to run FFED3D more slowly than XP, hence I need a monster graphics card to get a decent frame rate.
I would be interested to know how the game performs under W7 :confused:
 
My biggest problem with Vista is that it seems to run FFED3D more slowly than XP, hence I need a monster graphics card to get a decent frame rate.
I would be interested to know how the game performs under W7 :confused:

Not well - if you try to go full screen it dies, has no icons and the bottom of the console is blacked out like the letterboxing in a movie. Windowed it seems to run fine but still no icons and the console problem. Visually it looks fine. Also the Mod Manager doesn't work either.
 
My biggest problem with Vista is that it seems to run FFED3D more slowly than XP, hence I need a monster graphics card to get a decent frame rate.
I would be interested to know how the game performs under W7 :confused:

I have W7 64bit, FFED3D is SWEET :D, (buffet won't work so edit if you must while you still have XP)
 
Mixed reports re. W7 then :(

BUFFET should work when Whertz releases v2


Some new grabs from FFED3D

The ship you hope you'll never have to use...

Escapenew.jpg



This is just a new logo for the bottom of the screen, during the intro. Simple, but I like it :D

Frontendnew.jpg
 
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This project deserves offical opensource standing, and offical acknowledgement by Frontier. Great job on it, it's am amazing rework. In the near future, when I've got some time. I'll break out Blender, and start providing some new models for this.

Star trek or starwars mod anyone? no no I'm just kidding don't worry!

Great job! It's a pleasure to play FFE again! AND I CAN BUY A SHIP WITHOUT THE GAME CRASHING! YAY!
 
This is a good idea on the Elite Russia forum, making the stars in FFED3D more realistic...


Old Style Star

star_old.jpg



New Style Star

star_new.jpg


Unfortunately the proturberances are not animated. Maybe something for Elite IV ;)
 
iconfix

i had this icon problem a long time....
until i found out its resolution bound and can be fixed by editing ffewin.cfg, everything is fine when you run it windowed in a resolution of 1280x1024 with "aspect fix=1", even bigger works well but keep the proportions of it, fullscreen use a resolution of 1680x1050 and "aspect fix=0" then you get a nice big screen in nearly the same proportions than original (320x200).

tell me if it works for you as well as for me, and fiddle around with it by yourself a bit to find out what works best for you.
try to make batch files for different ffewin.cfg's to load.;)
contact.gif


and the sun shown above will be no longer a melon
further, to run ffe under dos-box use 1600x1000 (w/fs), nice high-res screen without blur
 
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btw the Mod Manager works well, rename folders (remove remnants from kyrillian letters), it also works for a lot of other games, cause it simply moves specified folders and backsup old ones.
 
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